EDITOR'S NOTE:
The following is a guest editorial written by a resident of the Palm Beach North and Jupiter area community.

Our military veterans, who we will honor on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, are obviously dissimilar -- with disparate backgrounds; diverse races, religions and ethnicities; and different politics and sexual orientations. But they are united by one significant quality.

They all devoted themselves to the overriding needs of a transcendent entity of which they were a faithful part. And this quality is admirably shared by committed people in a host of fields throughout society.

That quality, quite simply, is public service -- the umbrella concept which unifies all veterans and all others who give willingly to further a common good.

A long and venerated ideal

Today's public service legions, military and civilian, march in the noble line of a long and venerated ideal.

In ancient Greece, fulfilling public duties was considered indispensable to Athenian citizenship. Pericles, the 5th century B.C. statesman and a veteran of the First Peloponnesian War, called civic obligation an honor, because a citizen is "chosen for public service as a reward for his abilities."

In more modern times, existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, a veteran of the World War II French Resistance, also took that wide view of life's duties, writing that "our responsibility ... involves all mankind."

Another existentialist and French Resistance veteran, Albert Camus, declared: "Life is the sum of all your choices."

Choices are critical

According to that influential philosophy, those choices are critical. Every time we freely choose our actions in life, we help create our distinctive, personal essence. By that criterion, then, choosing to do public service -- through military or other means -- can visibly define our essence, the core of who we are, as a model well worth emulating.

The beauty of public service is that it nourishes us both as individuals and as a community. Superficially, that service may appear to benefit only a collective. But in truth, properly serving the self-interest of the one and rightly serving the broader interest of the many are intrinsically connected.

So while public service often is commended as selfless, it also invariably avails the self.

As citizens of a society and world in which that service occurs, we do benefit in our own lives -- though sometimes, admittedly, in subtle ways. We benefit by being part of a totality that's more secure, more just, more aware and more capable of providing requisite functions.

Loyalty

Ultimately, a strong community depends on a widespread appreciation that - although we value individualism - we are by nature social beings, inevitably part of a larger whole, to which we owe an obligation -- and that this individualism and obligation are fully compatible. It's surely no shame if public servants' motives combine a loyalty to their own welfare and to the welfare of fellow humans.

The heroic Vietnam veteran John McCain, in an eloquent farewell letter released after his recent death, affirmed that "our identities are not circumscribed but enlarged by serving good causes bigger than ourselves."

Currently, only a small percentage of the United States population is comprised of veterans and with our all-volunteer force, that proportion is shrinking. Their numbers presently total 7 percent of Americans, down considerably from 18 percent in 1980.

This country has approximately 21.12 million veterans, 16.27 million (77 percent) of whom served in wartime: 771,000 in World War II, 1.6 million in Korea, 6.8 million (including myself) in Vietnam, and 7.1 million in the Mideast wars.

'Thank you for your service'

Throughout history, military personnel have advanced vital national interests, as they were then perceived. To be sure, some wars and other actions have been intensely controversial and protesting them is a cherished right of free people, but our veterans deserve sincere recognition undiluted by any controversy over national policy.

That is acknowledged and encapsulated in the greeting often given to active or former members of our armed forces: "Thank you for your service" -- which is especially appropriate to say on Veterans Day.

Military service -- as well as intelligence, police and fire-rescue work -- is dramatically different from other forms of public service in that danger to life is inherent and not incidental. But these perilous pursuits and the less-risky civilian types of service are alike in that they all assert an individual, inescapable responsibility for a community's well-being -- a responsibility that cannot be shrugged off or left to others.
The myriad of normally safer yet deeply imperative services that surround us promote causes such as social justice, health care, education, environmental protection, global consciousness and similar necessities.

FYI ...

Their purveyors include:
-- Young activists who animate their idealism to seek a better world.
-- Americorps participants who undertake a variety of challenges, including the Volunteers In Service To America (VISTAs) who have strengthened immigrant programs at Jupiter's El Sol.
-- Peace Corps members who nurture a planetary citizenship by elevating living conditions in numerous countries.
-- MyClinic health providers who offer free care to our underserved neighbors.
-- Jupiter Medical Center aides who every day help patients and professionals.
-- Residents who clean up our littered shoreline with the Friends of Jupiter Beach.
-- Teachers who accept relatively low pay and those who donate time at schools, to prepare our next generation.
-- And, yes, journalists whose mission of keeping a democracy's citizens informed is notably protected in our Constitution.

Essential - for any community

All these roles, and more, are truly patriotic and essential -- for any community, international to local, is a complex interrelationship of security, economics, social environs and civic morality, which rely greatly on an array of public services to foster lives of humane existence.

There always are people who shirk that service. But they are outweighed by a multitude of dedicated givers who enrich society without trying to enrich themselves -- whether it's those who join the military or those who enhance lives in so many other ways.

In McCain's last letter, he expressed thankfulness "for the rewarding life of service in uniform and service in public office," which "brings happiness more sublime than life's fleeting pleasures."

Veterans such as McCain and millions of his compatriots are vivid examples of dedicated service to communal, large-scale endeavors -- service that simultaneously, on its smallest scale, also profits us personally.

All honored veterans

Whether those examples induce people to serve in the armed forces or in the profusion of other worthwhile opportunities our country and community offers, they are exemplars we perpetually need.

So let Veterans Day remind us and inspire us to reach, however we can, the highest levels of civic engagement. We can all be honored veterans of our country's crucial callings.